I have a string which in general looks something like
a="{x,16,x,1T,x}"
In other words it looks like a list with a mixture of characters and
numbers and so on. I want to pick out the individual elements of this
(using the commas as delimiters)
Clearly a[[1]] etc doesn't mean anything
I can do b=ToExpression[a] and I get a list so b[[1]] is x and
b[[2]]=16 (that is the number sixteen but I can convert this back into =
a
string with ToString. The problem is b[[4]] which ToExpression turns
into T as it thinks I mean 1 x T.
So I would appreciate help with either
i) converting my original string to a list as I would like
Or
Ii) stopping the evaluation of 1T into T so that I can get the string 1T
(The only thought I had was to step through the original string
character by character telling it to put the characters into different
elements of a list each time I pass a comma, but this looked a bit
cumbersome).
Many thanks,
Peter King